I step in under cover, shrug off first my backpack, then my rain jacket. Then I sit under the rock overhang, watching the rain as it slides off down the valley away from me. I think, ‘I am sheltering from the rain.’ It is big in here. Not quite a cave but a deep wedge, high enough, even this far in, for a person to stand. For people to stand.

I think again of Steff, standing with her back against my door the day before I left. Her low tight voice.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

I didn’t say anything, my stomach tightened. I sat on my bed and waited. I knew that whatever she was going to say would not surprise me. The room shrank around her and she shook it slowly with her head.

‘It’s fucking disgusting. That’s what I think. There’s people spend their whole lives trying to find their kids, you know that? Kids who spend their whole lives trying to find mothers, fathers, aunties, anyone. You wouldn’t have a clue, would you?’

She took a step away from the door, into the room. Practically hissed the next bit. ‘Think you’ll go walkabout do you? Try and find yourself?’

I raised my hand to my mouth. There was a sound caught in the back of my throat. Steff thrust one hand forward, like a policeman, as if to stop me speaking. I cleared my throat, but I had nothing to say.

‘Well let me tell you sister,’ she said at last, ‘you’re just buying time, and you’re buying it with pain. Other people’s pain.’ She paused and said at last the thing she had wanted to say. ‘Your little girl’s pain.’

The cave is cool and quiet, protected from the weather. Outside the sky is a dense grey sheet. Steff, with her broad face and dark eyes. Her white skin. White, but not like me. That is what she was telling me: she would never be like me. She crossed the room, passing my bed on the way to the window, knocking a pile of folded clothes to the floor. She didn’t stop. Reached the window and opened it wide, as if to let in clean air.

‘Got what you wanted, didn’t you? They all feel sorry for you.’ She spoke conversationally, turning back into the room. She raised her voice now that she had said what she needed to. ‘Bet you’ve been wanting people to feel sorry for you your whole life, haven’t you?’ She looked straight at me, held my gaze. ‘Yeah, you have.’ She shook her head. ‘Unbelievable.’

*

There is a darkened patch on the rock ceiling. At first I think it might be damp, a seeping crack, but looking down I see a smudge of charcoal and below it burnt sticks. If I started now I could be at the station in an hour or so. Or I could head back to the main road and find myself a hotel for the night. In the gloom, I squat and pick up a blackened twig, clear a space on the rock floor, draw a heart, a feathered arrow. Love heart. Stupid. I rub it out. On the wall behind me I find scratched initials, a charcoal cock and balls. Primitive rock art. The rock floor is coated with a dry, sandy residue that might one day become soil. There is a broad flat area next to the fireplace. I open my pack and unroll my sleeping mat. Pull out my stove, lamp, matches. No one will pass now; not before morning.

After I have spread the sleeping bag on the thin blue mat, I find a flat rock where I place the stove and half fill the saucepan with water from the rock face outside. I fish out a couple of small pieces of vegetation, leaving a brown sediment in the bottom. I get the packet of soup from the backpack and reach for the matches to light the stove, but in the end I don’t.

It is that indeterminate time between dusk and nightfall, when nothing can be done. When it feels that nothing can be done but wait. I pull another jumper from the pack and carry my sleeping bag to the mouth of the cave. Cave. I say it again. Try to make it solid. I am sitting at the mouth of the cave. I am looking out. I pull my knees up to my chest and the rain falls steadily, settling in for the night.

The ants too are seeking shelter. A wavering column. They clamber singly and in pairs up the wet moss outside the cave, in under the rocky overhang, antennae still flattened against their heads. Outside, the water washes down the rock face, parting around the mossy outcrops as if they were eyebrows. They are larger than the ants at the nursing home, these ones. Reddish brown rather than black, but they work with the same purpose, moving impossibly fast for their size, most of them clasping above them one, sometimes two, spherical milky eggs. They thin out as night approaches and disappear, as ants do, almost magically. The file fading, then gone. This is the first rain I remember, heavy rain, since I woke up.

Sitting here now on the edge of a cave in the rain, I am reminded suddenly of that first exercise with Anna, jiggling up and down in the room with the three old women. The feeling of my legs afterwards, heavy and boneless. That is how it feels now. The memory locates itself in my body, so that even as I look down and see my legs clearly outlined before me, I experience them only as a distant formless buzzing. And I see again my mother’s dark hair floating in a ring on the water.

I sit for a long time in the gathering dark. At first the feeling is so strong, so convincing, that I believe I cannot walk. I think I will have to wait until someone passes by tomorrow and ask them to call me an ambulance. Then I think that I will be dead before then, that I will not be able to endure being like this: the crawling, swarming pain in my legs and pelvis, the feeling of darkness and badness that wraps itself all around me, my throat and face. The certainty that this is not survivable. I think that I am bad. A bad seed. I think that it is my fault. Eventually I start to notice the thoughts and that I am thinking them, and that behind the thoughts is the feeling, just sitting there, as familiar as day, not doing anything in particular.

In the darkness a new memory begins to cohere around me, less memory than sensation, pressed and fingered out of the blackness that now surrounds me (the hard vault of the cave), easing its way through the body’s grammar, expanding into the flaring parentheses of the ribs, nudging through the body’s contraction (the heart), reprising, reclaiming its form (now opening, relinquishing the child.

I am five. I am in a cave. I am waiting for my mother.

When I awoke it was black. A darkness so thick it displaced all else. No thought or name or word. No throat or tongue. Just darkness and pressure and after a while a rhythmic gathering and collapsing, forming and unforming. Sound/ Sobbing/ Self.

I did not try to move, that night all those years ago. Nor did I try to stop the sound, a slow low murmuring. I could not tell if my eyes were open or closed so I pressed them together to find their edges. I could feel the rock hard against my bottom and back, which were wedged still into the rear of the cave. In the darkness I could no longer tell where I ended or the darkness began. I was the cave and the darkness was inside me. Even my breath, a wet panting, seemed as if it came from somewhere or something much bigger. I whimpered for my mother. I said her name, the name I called her, and in the saying (the syllables moulded and pressed forth from my mouth) I felt myself come into focus. This was me; everything else was the desire for my mother. There was me and there was my wanting. I was oddly comforted by the wanting, and the knowing that it was mine, and the recognition that this meant that I existed, and that she did too. I stroked myself softly with the small blunt syllables and after a while I had the powerful sense that I was no longer alone, that my mother whom I had summoned up with my crooning was now with me. I felt that as I lay curled in the cave she lay curled around me, filling my chest with her breathing, enveloping me in a rich golden light. And once again I slept.

My daughter was born on a Thursday, at daybreak. ‘Seems a bit unfair doesn’t it,’ said the nurse who brought me breakfast afterwards, ‘to go so long and not even remember the birth.’ But I didn’t mind, not at the time; it had been a relief, my birth plan abandoned (the CDs, the oil burner still in a bag in the corner). I’d wanted drugs. I’d wanted the pain to end. Even so, when I emerged from the fog, it was hard to understand that the ancient shrouded creature in the container beside me was mine, and once or twice I found myself wondering if she was—if there might have been some error, if my child might have disappeared with someone else. I didn’t tell Michael, though, nor that I had felt easier before the birth (my child held tightly within the rim of my belly), nor that some days when I looked at her all I could feel was an aching whose borders could not be patrolled.

The nurse who was trying to teach the baby to suck said that a lot of women felt this way and that I could expect to be a bit blue for a few days. When she pushed the baby’s face on to my dark, enormous nipple, I worried that the child would choke. It seemed to be trying to pull its head away.

‘C’mon you,’ said the nurse sternly and I was not sure if she was talking to the child or to me, and either way there were great fat tears leaking down my face, plopping on to the baby’s head. It didn’t work anyway. There was milk but not enough and the baby was fretful.

It went on for a week or two, even when we were back in the flat, the baby crying, me rigid, the visiting nurse insisting, the baby losing weight, Michael ringing a colleague, the nurse (eventually) backing down. It did not worry me as much as it should have. I felt safer with her in my lap, being able to see how well she was feeding, how much she had drunk from the bottle, which would not smother her, and which could be filled and cleaned at call, and which could be passed to Michael. I liked that she did not depend only on me, that she had Michael also, the two of us. One egg. Two baskets.

It was not, I tried to explain to the nurse on her last visit, that I did not want to hold my child. The nurse was worried there was a problem, and perhaps there was but it was not the one she thought.

I loved, with a feeling so powerful I am not sure, even now, if it was right (or even love—so blank and urgent) to watch my child as she slept. I leaned over the crib and inhaled her. I put my face as close as I dared to her sweet biscuity crown and breathed and breathed and breathed in the dark. She was a good sleeper; I was not. Three or four times a night I woke and stood like this beside her. I checked first to see that she was alive, that she was breathing, and then I just stayed there.

Sometimes she woke and mewled or cried and I felt guilty and soothed her and moved away. I did not want to oppress her. Once, though, she grabbed my hair with her hand, as if she knew what she was doing, and I stayed there hunched over her for what seemed like an hour until my back was screaming, though I barely noticed. I just kept breathing her in until at last it seemed that I could feel her inside me, curled in my chest, a thick treacly light.

‘That’s it,’ Anna whispers to me now. ‘That is the feeling. That is love.’

*

I think now of the day I lay down. The day that the woman Andrea visited and told me about my husband. And about what had already happened before she came: the postman on his bike and the letter from America. The letter was from Ted, forwarded unopened by Stuart. He wrote in a black pen in his old man’s writing, and told me that my mother had died. (How many times, I wondered, could one woman die?) Ted wrote that she had got up as usual the Thursday before, and had eaten her breakfast and read the paper and reminded him that the boys would be over for dinner. Then she had walked up the driveway towards the car and collapsed. It was a blood clot, he said, in the brain. Just like that. He had sat with her for some hours, he wrote, on the driveway and in the ambulance and then the hospital, but she had not regained consciousness. He just hoped she knew he had been there with her. That she had known she was not alone.

It was a dignified letter, and calm and generous. My mother had always loved me, he wrote, as much as she loved the boys, and she had always believed that one day she and I would find each other again. ‘You were always very much a part of our family,’ he wrote, ‘and always will be.’ He would have rung, he said, but he didn’t have my number. There were other details too, the death notice and funeral arrangements and even news of a small legacy, which they had always agreed would be mine even though, as he wrote, ‘we never expected your mother to go first’.

I read the letter and put it away. I put it in the box at the top of the linen closet in which I kept all my mother’s letters, from the first, to this, the last. I wrapped the box again, as I always did, in a shawl I remembered her wearing when I was a child and which I slept with for many years after she left. It is a soft lichen green, like her eyes. After I had wrapped it I pushed it again to the back of the highest shelf, where no one would find it. Not even me. And after a while my head began to ache.

There is no use crying inside the cave, I know that now, so I stand outside in the rain where everything is wet and my tears are part of something bigger and I can let them come. I cry for Ted and for my little brothers, who have lost their mother, and I cry for my mother who lost hers, and for Hil and for my daughter and for myself.

Eventually I notice that my legs feel different, more normal, and that when I turn on the torch briefly and look down at them they seem sturdy and uncomplicated. I wonder what Anna would make of all this. Whether I will tell her. I think I will. The rain is slowing. It occurs to me that if I decide to go back to Michael I will need to talk a lot more and I will have to have sex. I think of my dependable husband with his shy hidden smile and his oyster eyes and the expression I could never name. And of that terrible tender revulsion that allows us to send our fingers and tongues into another’s body even when that body will only leave, or die. To share the sourness of daybreak saliva (the magpies’ morning cries pooling beyond the window as we kiss). To suck each other’s glistening eyes and swallow. Perhaps that too is love.

As I watch, the wind starts to move the storm clouds around, starts to break them down so that I see at first the pale strong glow of the moon shining through the thinnest areas, and eventually a clear space that grows slowly larger, through which, after a while, I can see the bright white disc high up, above the wind.

‘Is there anything you want from me?’ asked Anna. ‘Is there anything you would like me to do?’

From here, looking up, the ring of clear sky looks like a pool of dark water in the clouds and the moon, high, high up, looks like its own reflection, gleaming back at me.

What I think now is that I would like to touch her face. What I want to do is to touch her face, her eyes. I want to touch around her eyes with the soft pads of my fingers. I would like to press the pads of my fingers softly beneath her eyes, follow the ring of bone around, rest my fingertips quietly against the creases.

After a while I notice, just inside the cave, a pile of twigs, kindling, and beyond, several larger pieces of wood. The rain has stopped. I pull the broken branches on to the damp flat rock outside and light myself a fire. I cook the soup first and when the fire is hot enough and the bigger sticks have become embers, I push the banana in and let it cook until the skin is black; the flesh inside sweet and pulpy. Like my mother used to do. Bananas and ice-cream. Mother. I let myself think properly at last about my own little girl, about Lily—whether it is true, as I have tried to tell myself, that she will be better without me. And I answer myself with the answer I have known all along.

In the darkness, my daughter arrives quietly, unsurprisingly, fully formed. She has toes and feet and five-year-old fingers with tiny shredded nails. She has elbow joints, hip sockets, knuckles—all connected by gristle and muscle and hot dry skin. She has green eyes and that lustrous ludicrous hair. She smells of metal or raspberries, I never can decide. She throws her thin arms around my neck and pulls me against her so hard it hurts. She is all angles. She is very serious. She says, My mummy. I am hers.

*

I used to say to Anna, when she asked about her, ‘My mother did this’ or ‘My mother did that’; always, ‘my mother’: my mother hated sewing, my mother had one of those faces. People used to stare. Even in the street, even as a small child, I remember the feeling. Of her being looked at.

‘What did you call her?’

‘What?’

‘What did you call your mother?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Did you call her Mum? Or Mummy?’

‘Oh. Mum, I suppose.’

‘Mama?’

‘I don’t remember.’

But I do. The mouth sound comes to me now, sitting in the bush with the smell of hot banana around me. I feel it forming in my throat, how my mouth and lips make the shape to contain and hold it, how I almost draw the sound back into me, like milk. Embarrassing, even here, in the night. Even to mouth it. (Mama.) I feel the cushion of my lips, allow the sound to escape in tiny bursts, puffs of moist air, placid, experimental. She is mine.